An air-mass meter, which is developed as a hot-film air-mass meter, for instance, is usually provided for measuring a fresh-air mass flow in a combustion engine. Because of the cyclical operation of the combustion engine, however, the air supply takes place in an intermittent manner, so that pulsations impinge upon the actual gas flows in the combustion engine.
These pulsations in the gas-routing system of the combustion engine may have high amplitudes that lead to a corresponding periodic sensor signal. On account of the channel structure in the interior of the air-mass meter, however, the pulsations in the air routing that include a transmission error (mean value, phase and amplitude errors) are able to be measured by the sensor element. Since the sensor values of the measured air-mass flow are usually averaged, the actual mean value of the air-mass flow detected by the air-mass meter is falsified.
Various approaches for computationally correcting the error caused by the pulsation in the ascertainment of a gas-mass flow are available in the related art.
Methods for compensating a measuring error of a measuring signal representing an air-mass flow in a combustion engine are described in, for example, European and German Patent Applications EP 0962642 B1, DE 10 2009 056796 A1, EP 1114244 B1 and DE 19620435 C1.